“Don’t worry. I did the rest after she was gone. Jean doesn’t seem the romantic type.”
Faye did not want to think of her parents that way, in a bed together, doing the things one must do to make the babies they’d made.She shook the image away and sat on the bed to remove her shoes. “My feet are so tired!”
William bent before her and undid the straps on her low heels, held each foot in his hands, caressing firmly. How could his touching her feet cause whooshing everywhere, thrumming in private places that drove her mad? She wanted to put her fingers in his hair, pull and push. “William, I—”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s no rush.”
“It’s not that. It’s, well, I don’t really know what to do next.”
“Come,” he said. “Let me help you with the buttons.”
She stood, turned her back to him. William’s fingertips and knuckles grazed the length of her spine as he moved down. A shiver coursed through her, and she held her breath. With the last button released, Faye slipped the shoulders down and stepped out of the dress, carefully laying it over the arm of the chair in the corner. She stood exposed in her foundations and stockings.
William took a step back, and for a moment, Faye thought he might be disappointed. Instead, he let out a whistle on a sigh. “You are a beauty.”
She smoothed her hands down her body, the stiff boning and rough fabric, and realized she’d forgotten something important. She looked around the room and spotted the little valise in the corner. She couldn’t do this in front of him, not yet. “I need to change. Into something else.”
In the bathroom across the hall, Faye stared at her gold rings, the perfect little diamonds. Her hands were small and soft, childlike, which to her made the ring set look like something from a gumball machine. She had assumed she would live at home with Thomas and Jean, never marry, never allow anyone close enough to see her flaws. All her fine thoughts about taking the money she skimmed from the flower shop and embarking on some grand journey of reconciliation—that was the wishful thinking of achild squirreling away for a toy from a catalog. The truth was that she had taken dollars back out here and there, for lipstick, perfume, for matinees on her own. Truth was there were not that many bad men who came into the flower shop who deserved to be swindled out of their hard-earned money. Truth was she had not amassed a small fortune in her coffee can. She had seventeen dollars left, an amount she’d put in her pocketbook when she packed up her room. She thought of Conor O’Kane, the way he had looked at her, in her white dress, her hair pinned up and curled under the floral crown ...
No, no, no.He would not take anything from her. She would not allow it.
She pulled her slip over her head, removed her hose, slid both over a towel rack. She unhooked the stiff bra, pulled down the girdle, which held her young belly in place, and cast both aside. She stood on her tiptoes on the cool pink-and-black tile to consider her breasts in the small mirror. She unwrapped the package she’d placed at the bottom of the valise. The palest blue, the softest nylon, simple and elegant. She’d seen the chemise through a shop window and had bought it for herself. It slid over her body and fell into place like scales on a mermaid.
When she returned to the bedroom, William was under the covers, propped on his elbow to watch her walk in. His shirt was off, his bare shoulder as naked as any man she’d ever seen. The lamp was lit next to his side of the bed. The covers were turned down on what would be hers, from here on out, for all the days of their marriage.
“Oh,” he said, awe pouring out of him. She slid into the sheets, warm from the heat of him, laced with his smell. His hand wrapped around hers. She curled to him, put their clasped hands to her lips, sighed warm breath into them. Love slipped over her like a nightgown.
Chapter Eight
1960: Mid-Coast Maine
The leaves were down, and they’d already had snow when Faye, home from the grocery, noticed a strange car in the driveway. She set the packages on the counter. She’d planned a romantic dinner for William with music and candles to celebrate Kennedy’s victory. Was he home early? “William?”
Unlike her husband’s reedy voice, this one from the other room rumbled like thunder.
“In here.”
She walked into the living room. Conor O’Kane was on the couch, his arm extended across the back, legs crossed like this was his place.
HerLifemagazine was open on the table in front of him to the spread that Faye had so admired about the young senator from Massachusetts that all the women went on about. His glamorous wife, like Faye, was more than a decade younger than her dashing husband and, unlike Faye, was quite pregnant that November.
She’d read theLifearticle while William watched the news, peppering him with facts as she read them.
“You know Jackie was twenty-four when she got married.”
“And John Kennedy was a decade older than her.”
“And he was in the navy.”
“She is going to have that baby any day. What an exciting time for them!”
Faye had hoped she might be pregnant by now. They’d been married for months, had been intimate plenty by Faye’s measure, though what was too much or too little was hard to say. She liked it enough, especially the attention William paid her afterward, when he collapsed into her, flushed with exertion, the way he murmured and stroked her hair, as if grateful to her for something essential. He would ask sometimes if she was okay, and she was, though her body felt a wanting. Wanting what, though, Faye didn’t know. Maybe if they made a baby, that feeling would go away. But her cycle had come three times since the wedding, and with each one, a rising panic. William had done his part. Clearly, the failure was hers.
Faye had gone to bed the night before, hopeful Kennedy would defeat Nixon, that this elegant family would go to the White House. She had hoped for it as if it would say something about her own prospects for happiness. At twenty-three, it was Faye’s first time voting. She and William had gone to the ballots together. “For the Irishman, of course,” William had said, when a neighbor asked how they’d voted.
But as she stood now in her own living room, all hope and happiness drained from her at the sight of Conor O’Kane.
She knew from her father that O’Kane had come to the cove house a few times, that for some odd reason, Jean welcomed him, made him tea and buttered his bread, even smoked cigarettes with him, which bothered Thomas to no end. “She stops short of mending the holes in his socks,” her father had quipped. “Though to my knowledge, he hasn’t asked.” When Faye about fainted with worry the first time he mentioned it, Thomas reassured her that Conor seemed wholly uninterested in Faye or William. “They talk about Ireland and the old days, stories upon stories. I don’t like to hear ... I walk away when they start in. He doesn’t say much about what he’s up to now.”
